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Australia's insurance industry is turning to geospatial information services technology to better predict which areas are likely to flood. Esri's Simon Thompson has consulted with the industry to construct a flood model. Thanks to GIS, Thompson said, "[I]nsurance policies will carry equitable pricing, based on specific risk, and not subsidising risky properties through higher premiums on everyone."

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SAP says it's working with Esri to boost the integration of their respective products. "By integrating ESRI's industry leading GIS with SAP HANA, the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform and SAP Mobile Platform as well as geospatial analytics within SAP Lumira, we are enriching business data with geographical context and presenting it in real time," SAP's Steve Lucas said in a statement.

Australian college student Grace Lin's plan to improve Perth railway access for senior citizens through the use of GIS technology has won her the Esri Young Scholars Award and a trip to the Esri User Conference in San Diego. Her study of the railways was the first to use GIS to provide insight into accessibility to the railways and the surrounding Perth areas.

Master's degree student Chris Weidemann has developed an application that mines geospatial information shared by Twitter users and analyzes it using Esri's ArcGIS software to create a geospatial picture of a specific Twitter user or a region's users as a whole. Weidemann next plans to take his app, Twitter2GIS, a step further and allow Twitter users to test the app and see what it can deduce about their movements. "My intent is to educate social media users and inform the public about their privacy," Weidemann said.

Australia's insurance industry is turning to geospatial information services technology to better predict which areas are likely to flood. Esri's Simon Thompson has consulted with the industry to construct a flood model. Thanks to GIS, Thompson said, "[I]nsurance policies will carry equitable pricing, based on specific risk, and not subsidizing risky properties through higher premiums on everyone."

First responders are turning to geospatial tools to help prepare for, and recover from, natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, says Esri's public safety and homeland security director, Russ Johnson. Emergency managers are just scratching the surface with GIS capabilities: Until recently, they were used primarily to gather information for public consumption, but now, geospatial tools are starting to help coordinate logistics, he notes. Johnson adds that the combination of location data and social tools will create a powerful means of sharing information.